Remember when you could click a link and just read something? That internet is dead.

Ads

You click an article. Video ad autoplays at full volume. You hunt for the mute button. It's fake. Clicking it opens a new tab. You close the tab. Sticky header ad eats a third of your screen. You scroll. Another ad. The page reflows because an ad loaded. You lost your place. Popup asks you to subscribe. Another popup asks you to disable your ad blocker.

Fuck this. I leave.

Every website is now a hostile maze designed to extract maximum value while providing minimum utility. The ads don't even work anymore. We've all developed banner blindness and learned which close button is real. The solution? More ads.

Cookie Consent Theater

GDPR gave us full-screen modals on every site that might as well say "Please click Accept All so we can get back to exploiting your data."

The "reject all" button either doesn't exist or requires fifteen clicks through nested menus. Some sites force you to toggle forty-seven different cookie categories individually while explaining why disabling them will "degrade your experience" (it won't).

You do this on every single site you visit. The internet used to be about freedom of information. Now it's about negotiating your personal data before you can access anything.

Paywalls Everywhere

Every publication thinks they're worth fifteen dollars per month. If I subscribed to every publication that paywalled me last month, I'd spend more than my rent. So I don't read any of them. I bounce off and find a worse source, one that's free because it's subsidized by those same cancerous ads.

The open web has been carved up and sold off. Information that was freely accessible is now locked behind a thousand different subscription walls.

What We Lost

We lost the weird, personal, beautiful internet. Hand-coded HTML. Webrings. Passionate hobbyists sharing information because they loved it, not because they needed to hit Q3 monetization targets.

We lost sites where information just existed. No ads. No popups. No cookie banners. Pure information, freely given.

We lost forums where people helped each other. Personal blogs written for joy, not SEO. The idea that the internet was a commons, a public good.

The Bottom Line

Websites stopped being about users and started being about extracting value from users. Every design decision is "how do we make more money?" not "how do we help people?"

The internet is shit now. And unless something changes, it's only getting shittier.